Tormenting Cubs, the Mets Are Dogged, Stoked and First to Pounce

CHICAGO — A line drive, a blur, is already past David Wright when he leaps, reaches back and plucks it out of the air. A peach-fuzz-cheeked lefty fireballer throws an elegant curve and changeup to set down a fearsome Cubs slugger.

First baseman Lucas Duda, immersed for two weeks in the deepest of hitting snoozes, awakens and goes ambulatory, hitting a moonshot into the center-field bleachers. When the Mets have finished, they have outscored Chicago by 8-3 on Wednesday.

There is a relentless, opportunistic quality to this Mets team now, like a shark trolling warm waters with a half-open mouth. Joe Maddon, the Cubs’ cool-cat smart manager, talked day after day of the importance of his Cubs getting out to a fast start, swinging at the first pitch, scoring the first run.

“You’ve got to get the other team back on their heels a little bit,” he said before Wednesday’s Game 4 of the National League Championship Series.

And each game the Mets ground those plans and his very young and talented team under their cleats. At the end of the troll line each game lurked Jeurys Familia, the closer with that fast and iron-heavy sinker. He has yet to give up a run in the playoffs.

In the past two weeks, it’s almost as if the Mets — and this pains me to type it, being a demented sort who has rooted against that Bronx team for decades — have become a bit like the Yankees of a decade back.

Manager Terry Collins, who endured long weeks at midseason in which his injured and depleted team searched for runs the way desert camels look for water, spoke of standing in his dugout Wednesday and not quite knowing what to make of it.

“Baseball is my whole life; I started playing when I was 4 or 5,” he said after the game, his Mets jacket soaked in champagne. “I’m sitting there and thinking: ‘Holy crap. Now you’re in the World Series.’ ”

Wednesday night began with a Curtis Granderson opposite-field single, a walk to Yoenis Cespedes, and that aforementioned mortar shot by Duda that made it 3-0. Then Travis d’Arnaud took a strike, and on the next pitch he took an outside fastball and deposited it beyond the ivy in right field.

So make it 4-0. It was as though someone had stuck in an IV and drained the energy out of the crowd at venerable Wrigley Field.

And this was all before the daily Daniel Murphy home run, this one stroked to a remote corner of the park. And before another appearance by the Timeless One, Bartolo Colon, who for kicks touched 91 miles an hour on his fastball before retreating to his usual neighborhood in the mid-80s.

He pitched as if on the mound at a Van Cortlandt Park softball game, with a perpetual hint of a smile, and perhaps for good reason. Few of these precocious Cubs hitters appeared to know what to do with him.

No one in my family is certain what to make of this, either, save for my youngest, Aidan, who forecast in spring training that the Mets would win 90 games and play in the World Series. Then again, he is, by his own acknowledgment, an insane enthusiast, who has trouble sleeping on the night before the Mets play.

For the Cubs, a fine young team that played in the toughest division in baseball and won more games than the Mets, this series represented a reckoning with reality. They started as many as five rookies in a single game this year and had several terrific hitters playing out of position, none more so than Mighty Kyle Schwarber, their young slugger.

He’s a catcher by trade, not a great defensive one, but a catcher nonetheless. The Cubs parked him in left, figuring on-the-job training would be offset by his powerful bat. In this series, he overran balls, dived and leapt at the wrong time, and failed to throw. He was always game and not so often accurate. A league championship series is a merciless time to try to refine your knowledge of a new position.

There are in fact many reasons for Cubs fans to harbor hope for the 100th-and-whatever year without a World Series title. They have a fine group of young hitters who call to mind the Cubs’ glory days of Ron Santo, Billy Williams and Ernie Banks. And their fans, who treated well the Mets apostates in their midst, rewarded their team at game’s end with a prolonged ovation.

“This is just the beginning; they’re really a different set of cats,” Maddon said before the game. “I get to walk in the door and find all these riches inside. Very fortunate for me as a manager.”

His team fell short with the lack of depth in its starting pitching, and perhaps with hitters who — for all the joie de vivre they displayed in pregame fielding drills and in their rhythmic clapping — appeared overeager, even tight, at the plate.

It took the Cubs several innings Wednesday to get their first hit, and they were facing 24-year-old Steven Matz, with fewer than 10 starts in the major leagues. There was also a sense throughout the series that Collins was a manager on top of his game.

He’d pull a pitcher, and the next one would get a strikeout. He sent out his kid pitchers and instructed them to throw strikes, and they did. Asked about his record of late, he smiled. Skill and luck are lifelong sprinters for any manager; some series one edges ahead, some series the other.

“When you’ve played 190 games, you’ve just got to realize when they work, you know, you’re happy, and when they don’t, oh well, that’s the way it goes,” Collins said. “If it doesn’t work, as I’ve said many times, my wife on the way home tells me it was a dumb move.”

It seems safe to say that Collins’s wife has had nothing to offer but encouragement these past few weeks. As Familia threw his last torcher by Dexter Fowler, and the Mets sprinted onto the field and commenced jumping and embracing and exchanging exuberant handshakes, it was clear that her husband’s team had not made a dumb move in a long while.

Email: powellm@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Dogged, Stoked and First to Pounce. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe